"Let me be clear again,
we do not expect to see 6 week tracking of pupil progress and vast elaborate
spreadsheets. What I want school leaders to discuss with our inspectors is what
they expect pupils to know by certain points in their life, and how they know
they know it. And crucially, what the school does when it finds out they don’t!
These conversations are much more constructive than inventing byzantine number
systems which, let’s be honest, can often be meaningless."
Amanda Spielman - Chief Inspector Ofsted - June 2018
For the second time in a week I find myself thinking that Amanda Spielman, Chief Inspector of Ofsted, is talking real sense. A few days ago it was her pronouncement that school's cannot be held responsible for fixing all society's ills - obesity included. Now, it is her comments on pupil data tracking which strike me as eminently sensible.
For years, pupil tracking has been 'de jour' in schools. We were encouraged, cajoled, perhaps even coerced by the 'powers-that-be' into thinking that this was good practice, best practice, next practice. "Not just data-rich, but data effective' was the buzz phrase on our lips. And so were born multitudes of spreadsheets - the more elaborate and shinier the better - all singing, all dancing. I remember back as far as 2009 going to visit a school in the Newry and Mourne District which had been identified as 'outstanding' in the whole field of data tracking. Of course, we saw many colourful and lengthy spreadsheets, RAGed (Red - Amber - Green) according to how well the pupils were meeting their TAGs (Target Attainment Grades), with associated columns for the teacher to indicate what intervention he / she was putting in place for underachieving pupils. The school in question had 6 tracking points in the year.
And yes, we introduced something similar in my own school. An 8-10 week tracking system linked to Target Attainment Grades and with intervention columns. "RAGed, TAGed and bobtailed", as one of my now retired senior teachers used to describe it. And so it was that - 4 times per year in October, January, March and June - poor teachers' dutifully tracked and recorded scores in almost unfathomable MIS marksheets, and wrote in intervention comments beside pupils who were underachieving, as if they were somehow responsible for pupil underachievement. By doing this, their attention was taken away from the real important stuff - learning and teaching in the classroom. Amanda Spielman refers to it as the 'byzantine number systems' - a system so elaborate and unwieldy as to defeat the very purpose of its inception, flawed though this purpose may have been.
Last year, we stopped our 8-10 week pupil tracking. Our concerns about how meaningful this process was came to the fore after we had digested Daisy Christodoulou's excellent book "Making Good Progress". But to be honest, our suspicions had been there for some time before that.
The assessments were not comparable. EG:
French tracking 1: October. End-of-chapter writing test on the topic of 'Family and Pets'. This topic was undertaken by pupils in class in the few weeks prior.
French tracking 2: December. Exam paper - listening, reading and writing - all topics covered since September.
French tracking 3: March. Listening test on topic of Sport. This topic was undertaken by pupils in the few weeks prior.
French tracking 4: June. Exam paper - speaking, reading and writing - all topics covered since September,
The inconsistencies and complexities are huge:
A: the assessment types are different.
B: Invariably cognitive science would suggest that the pupils may 'perform' better in the October and March trackings, as these are based on topics they have just completed. The summative December and June exams will contain a broad range of topics drawn from the large subject domain. Invariably, this will be a much more difficult challenge for pupils, particularly if no real learning has taken place, ie if the knowledge has not embedded in long term memory.
Therefore we are faced not just with skewed results from a largely incomparable tracking base across the year, but also with a potentially much larger looming problem - are we not distorting the distinction between formative and summative assessments?
It is this latter question which ultimately was the final straw for us in school as regards pupil tracking. Do we want the October and March assessments to be more formative in their nature. If we have put an intervention column beside them, then there is the assumption that we are using these assessments to gauge, identify misconceptions and for the purposes of responsive teaching. If, therefore, we want these tracking points to be formative, it is not possible surely to compare formative and summative assessments in the same pupil tracking model. They are two different systems.
Formative assessments, as per Daisy Christodoulou's research, should be specific, frequent and repetitive. I would also add 'low-stakes'. 'Frequent' does not in my opinion mean twice or thrice a year for the purposes of a spreadsheet, but rather will take the form of daily recap, weekly quizzes and ongoing retrieval practice in the classroom. True formative assessment, or 'responsive teaching' will then identify promptly through low-stakes quizzing and testing the misconceptions our pupils have, and address them.
This understanding of frequent, specific, low-stakes formative assessment is a rather uncomfortable bedfellow for pupil tracking models.
As a result, we no longer use pupil tracking. Rather, we focus our energies on retrieval practice in the classroom, pupil self-quizzing, daily recap and weekly quizzes. Teachers record raw marks from formative assessments informally in their classrooms for their own purposes, but we do not hold them centrally or track them. At Christmas and June our pupils undertake summative exams, and we use this to record grades.
And so our assessment policy hinges on the synthesis between low-stakes, frequent, regular classroom-based formative assessment, two summative assessments per year and the use of standardised annual tests to benchmark and identify progress, such as NGRT. We understand the distinction in our assessments, and hence why we no longer undertake pupil tracking. Because it is, as Amanda Spielman seems to indicate, a potential meaningless Byzantine system which - in my humble opinion - has the potential to confuse the distinction between different types of assessment and distract teachers' attention from what is really important - the nitty-gritty of robust learning and teaching in the classroom.
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